As you might have noticed, my primary interest relating to Symthic + BF is in researching how to shoot efficiently. It stems from ~90% of my primary weapon kills coming from DMRs, which does high damage per click but also has high SIPS and relatively slow SDec. Thus, shooting cadence... where you pause to allow SIPS to recover... is absolutely VITAL. Shoot too fast, and you get frustrated because your aim point is on target but no hitmarker... shoot too slow, and you get out-TTKed by EVERYTHING.

A tangent to that, is setting a nominally automatic weapon to its Burst mode, because functionally that is like shooting a DMR. A tangent to THAT, for guns without a burst-fire mode, you can do "micro-bursting" by holding the trigger just long enough for 2-3 bullets to be fired.

I justify simulating weapons being fired like that, because I simply cannot imagine people would hold down the trigger and shoot an entire magazine off at targets 50m+ away. Long before that, I thought the shooter would be alarmed by the amount of Recoil (both V- and H-) they see on the screen, plus the utter lack of hitmarkers due to SIPS, that the shooter would stop and allow the gun to recover.

I liken it to you touching a hot surface, your nerve endings sending PAIN signals to your brain to tell you to STOP THIS, and you will STOP touching it until it cools down. Then again I'm not a psychology major so maybe that analogy is totally wrong... but hopefully you catch my meaning.

Now that I have the formula to calculate Shooting Mechanics for any burst length, though, I started toying around with the question: given sufficiently high hitrate, is it still more efficient to burst / micro-burst? Or is it faster if you hold down the trigger until the kill registers?

Let's shoot it in fully automatic first. According to Hitrater, if you shoot 6 bullets in this instance, you can expect 4.9 hits. This is significant (and partly why I chose to highlight this case), because the expected damage is... 101.6113. Thus, you can reasonably conclude that in just about 100% of the time, you will secure a kill, if you are able to counter V-Recoil, in this situation.

"Perfect!" You say. "So every time I'm 40m away and I'm strafing, I shoot 6 bullets!"

Not so fast. According to Shooting Mechanics, if you are playing on a 40Hz server (getting more common now in CQL modes), it takes 22 / 40 frames to fire 6 bullets and then be ready for the next round. It will take 2 more frames to recover from the induced SIPS. With all that added together, I came up with a TTK of ~0.5905s.

Now let's set the gun to its 3RB mode. Again according to Hitrater, if you shoot 3 bullets in this instance, you can expect 2.86 hits, doing 59.30782 damage each time you click. In the same 40Hz server, it takes 11 / 40 frames to fire 3 bullets, plus 1 more frame to recover. Again, once you consider everything, I came up with a TTK of... 0.5058s.

You can see how that comes about: both the 6RB and 3RB takes 24 / 40 frames to finish doing their things, but 6RB nets you ~102 damage while 3RB x 2 gives you ~59.31 x 2 = ~119 damage. Higher damage, same "time," lower TTK.

-----

Of course, I realize that maintaining such "performance," having to consistently pull off perfect burst intervals, is probably not easy. When I looked at shooting 2RB out of 700RPM weapons (it is a setting with the CZ-805 and UMP-9), you need to do a click-rate of between 300 - ~342RPM, depending on server tick-rate. I tried that, and it is HARD! But such usage propels them to the top of my rankings. For now I have the AUG A3, AR160, CZ-805 and L86A1 at the top of my charts, all of them 700RPM and simulated by shooting 2RB. Ak5C, best Carbine, again 700RPM.

So, I'm wondering... is that a useful conclusion to draw, if very few people can achieve that performance? Or maybe I just suck at this clicking thing and in fact the majority of BF4 players do this easily? A poll, then!

dude, i'm definitely not a fast shot, but based on your poll, i should be one, considering i can shoot the cz75 just below max rpm extremely comfortably(it's basically my natural clickrate, that's why i fell in love with the gun, aside from the sexy looks)

I usually click at something between 230-350 rpm mainly because my best weapons are the m16 and ak12 ( at least in my old account ) and that probably is the same determiner for the most. Additionally when I took a break from BF4 my clicking rate got to something between 325-370 rpm.

"Before God We Are All Equal - All Equally Wise, And Equally Foolish"- Albert Einstein